This transnational, interdisciplinary study of traumatic neurosis moves beyond the existing histories of medical theory, welfare, and symptomatology. The essays explore the personal traumas of soldiers and civilians in the wake of the First World War; they also discuss how memory and representations of trauma are transmitted between patients, doctors and families across generations. The book argues that so far the traumatic effects of the war have been substantially underestimated. Trauma was shaped by gender, politics, and personality. To uncover the varied forms of trauma ignored by medical and political authorities, this volume draws on diverse sources, such as family archives and narratives by children of traumatized men, documents from film and photography, memoirs by soldiers and civilians. This innovative study challenges us to re-examine our approach to the complex psychological effects of the First World War.

Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they feel, how many research subjects were there and how many survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists selected one group rather than another, the book provides an important record of the research subjects having agency, reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.

“An engaging, compelling and disturbing confrontation with evil ...a book that will be transformative in its call for individual and collective moral responsibility." – Michael A. Grodin, M.D., Professor and Director, Project on Medicine and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust challenges you to confront the misguided medical ethics of the Third Reich personally, and to apply the lessons learned to contemporary human subjects research. While it is comforting to believe that Nazi physicians, nurses, and bioscientists were either incompetent, mad, or few in number, they were, in fact, the best in the world at the time, and the vast majority participated in the government program of “applied biology.” They were not coerced to behave as they did—they enthusiastically exploited widely accepted eugenic theories to design horrendous medical experiments, gas chambers and euthanasia programs, which ultimately led to mass murder in the concentration camps. Americans provided financial support for their research, modeled their medical education and research after the Germans, and continued to perform unethical human subjects research even after the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. The German Medical Association apologized in 2012 for the behavior of its physicians during the Third Reich. By examining the medical crimes of human subjects researchers during the Third Reich, you will naturally examine your own behavior and that of your colleagues, and perhaps ask yourself "If the best physicians and bioscientists of the early 20th century could do evil while believing they were doing good, can I be certain that I will never do the same?"

An unprecedented number of people were sent to 'lunatic asylums' in the nineteenth century. But what was life like inside? How was order maintained? And why were so many doctors on the verge of a breakdown themselves? This book provides a glimpse into the lives of patients and staff inside two London asylums at the turn of the twentieth century.

The idea for this book sprang from Geoffrey Cocks' curiosity as to what happened in the new, dynamic field of psychotherapy hi Germany with the advent of Hitler. While traditional views merely asserted that the Nazis destroyed the field of psychotherapy in Germany, a viewpoint justifiably based on the testimony of those in the field who had emigrated from Germany to escape Nazi persecution, Cocks learned that there was more to the story. He looked to several interesting shards of evidence that pointed to the possibility that one could reconstruct a history of morally questionable professional developments in German psychotherapy during the Third Reich. The evidence included: existence of a journal for psychotherapy published continuously from 1928 to 1944; accounts of a psychotherapist who assumed leadership of his colleagues and who was a relative of the powerful Nazi leader Hermann Goring; and a strong psychotherapeutic lobby in German medicine that was intellectually impoverished but apparently not destroyed by the expulsion of the prominent and predominantly Jewish psychoanalytic movement. Non-Jewish psychoanalysts and psychotherapists had in fact pursued their profession under the aegis of the so-called Goring Institute, with substantial support from agencies of the Nazi party, the Reich government, the military, and private business. Much research has been done in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, hence the need for a second edition. Included is more information on the history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany, on the social history of the Third Reich, and on the history of the professions in Germany. Three new chapters analyze postwar developments and conflicts as well as broader issues of continuity and discontinuity in the history of modern Germany and the West. In addition, the author has reorganized the volume along chronological and narrative lines for greater ease of reading. "Psychotherapy in the Third Reich "is an important work for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, and historians.

Shock therapy is making a comeback today in the treatment of serious mental illness. Despite its reemergence as a safe and effective psychiatric tool, however, it continues to be shrouded by a longstanding negative public image, not least due to films such as the classic One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, where the inmate of a psychiatric clinic (played by Jack Nicholson) is subjected to electro-shock to curb his rebellious behavior. Beyond its vilification in popular culture, the stereotype of convulsive therapy as a dangerous and inhumane practice is fuelled by professional posturing and public misinformation. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has in the last thirty years been considered a method of last resort in the treatment of debilitating depression, suicidal ideation, and other forms of mental illness. Yet, ironically, its effectiveness in treating these patients would suggest it as a frontline therapy, bringing relief from acute symptoms and saving lives. In this book, Edward Shorter and David Healy trace the controversial history of ECT and other "shock" therapies. Drawing on case studies, public debates, extensive interviews, and archival research, the authors expose the myths about ECT that have proliferated over the years. By showing ECT's often life-saving results, Shorter and Healy endorse a point of view that is hotly contested in professional circles and in public debates, but for the nearly half of all clinically depressed patients who do not respond to drugs, this book brings much needed hope.

In the late nineteenth century, scientists, psychiatrists, and medical practitioners began employing a new experimental technique for the study of neuroses: hypnotism. Though the efforts of the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot to transform hypnosis into a laboratory science failed, his Viennese translator and disciple Sigmund Freud took up the challenge and invented psychoanalysis. Previous scholarship has viewed hypnosis and psychoanalysis in sharp opposition or claimed that both were ultimately grounded in the phenomenon of suggestion and thus equally flawed. In this groundbreaking study, Andreas Mayer reexamines the relationship between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, revealing that the emergence of the familiar Freudian psychoanalytic setting cannot be understood without a detailed analysis of the sites, material and social practices, and controversies within the checkered scientific and medical landscape of hypnotism. Sites of the Unconscious analyzes the major controversies between competing French schools of hypnotism that emerged at this time, stressing their different views on the production of viable evidence and their different ways of deploying hypnosis. Mayer then reconstructs in detail the reception of French hypnotism in German-speaking countries, arguing that the distinctive features of Freud’s psychoanalytic setting of the couch emerged out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of the practitioners of hypnosis.

Drawing on casebooks and other practice records and linking case studies with synthetic chapters, Medical Practices, 1600-1900 offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the changing nature of ordinary and place medical practice in early modern Europe.

Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of early biomedical research with human subjects. Lederer offers detailed accounts of experiments conducted on both healthy and unhealthy men, women, and children, during the period from 1890 to 1940, including yellow fever experiments, Udo Wile's "dental drill" experiments on insane patients, and Hideyo Noguchi's syphilis experiments.

This collection takes the perspective that the historiography of science, technology, and medicine needs a broader approach toward regulation. The authors explore the distinct social worlds involved in regulation, the forms of evidence and expertise mobilized, and means of intervention chosen to tame drugs in factories, consulting rooms and courts.

This volume uncovers the roots of electroshock in America, an outgrowth of western patriarchal medicine with primarily female patients. The authors trace the history of electroshock in the United States in three historic stages: from an enthusiastic reception in 1940, to a period of crisis in the 1960s, to its resurgence after 1980. Early American experiments with electrical medicine are also examined, while the development of electroshock in America is considered through the lens of social, political, and economic factors. The revival of electroshock in recent decades is found to be a product of growing materialism in American psychiatry and the political and economic realities of managed medical care. The new material in the Updated Paperback Edition describes the resurgence of electroshock in the private psychiatric sector as a treatment of choice for depression.